Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. The contraction of a vowel or diphthong at the end of a word with a vowel or diphthong at the start of the following word.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A mixture of constituents, as of the blood; constitution; temperament.

n. A contraction of two vowels (as the final and initial vowels of united words) into one long vowel, or into a diphthong; synæresis; as, cogo for coago.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. In medicine, the mixture of the constituents of a fluid, as the blood; hence, temperament; constitution.

n. In grammar, a figure by which two different vowels are contracted into one long vowel or into a diphthong, as alēthea into alēthē, teicheos into teichous. It is otherwise called syneresis.

Etymologies

From Ancient Greek κρᾶσις (krāsis, "mixture"). (Wiktionary)

Examples

The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically.

It leads us back to the supposedly long-abandoned crasis theory which attributed an important role in the development and overcoming of disease to the peculiarities of the mixing of the substances solved in the body fluids.

"The roots of the Coptic language appear to have been generally monosyllabic, and the derivatives have been formed by a very simple system of prefixing, inserting, and affixing certain letters, which have usually undergone but little change, not having been incorporated with the root, nor melted down by crasis, nor softened by any euphonic rules."

For a man may be naturally inclined to pride, lust, anger, and strongly inclined so too, (forasmuch as these inclinations are founded in a peculiar crasis and constitution of the blood and spirits,) and yet by